Following a back and forth between T-Mobile and AT&T on promotions geared toward customers wanting to jump the carrier ship, AT&T announced today a short term promotion that actually rewards existing customers in addition to new users.

In the circles most of us hang out, it might seem incredible that featurephones – aka dumb phones – were still outselling smartphones until recently, but that was indeed the case right up to the first quarter of this year. The latest Gartner figures show that smartphones finally broke ahead in Q2, achieving 51.8 percent of worldwide phone sales.

Smartphones accounted for 51.8 percent of mobile phone sales in the second quarter of 2013, resulting in smartphone sales surpassing feature phone sales for the first time,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. Asia/Pacific, Latin America and Eastern Europe exhibited the highest smartphone growth rates of 74.1 percent, 55.7 percent and 31.6 percent respectively, as smartphone sales grew in all regions.

The news wasn’t quite so good for Apple, with its year-on-year marketshare dropping more than four points to 14.2 percent.

This does, however, reflect a period in which market leader Samsung launched a flurry of new handsets. Apple’s position is likely to improve substantially when the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C are launched, likely next month.

…For the first time ever, two-thirds of new phone acquirers are buying smartphones. Smartphone use is exploding in the United States, while PC sales are dropping. If 66 percent of mobile phone buyers purchase smartphones, and 36.3-percent of them get the iPhone, then that means almost a quarter of all phones bought in the U.S. […]